What the Waiting Costs

What the Waiting Costs

Somewhere in San Francisco right now, there is a person who has been meaning to sell their house for two years. They bought it in 2015, or 2011, or 1998, and they have watched the city convulse and recover and convulse again, and every time they got close to listing it something happened. Rates went up. The news got bad. A colleague told them to wait for the spring. The spring came and went and they waited for the fall, and the fall came and they decided to wait until after the election, and after the election they decided to wait until the market settled, and here they are in the spring of 2026 with more equity in that house than they have ever had, watching the inventory number sit at one hundred and forty-eight single-family homes for the entire city, and they are still waiting.

This piece is for that person.

It is also for the buyer who has been pre-approved for eight months and has lost three offers and decided, somewhere around the fourth open house in a row, that the market is irrational and cannot be predicted and therefore cannot be entered. That person is right about the first part. The market is, in certain respects, irrational, in the way that any market driven by human desire and geographic scarcity and the concentrated wealth of a single industry is irrational. But irrationality is not the same as unpredictability, and unpredictability is not the same as uninhabitable, and the person sitting out the San Francisco housing market on the grounds that it makes no sense is also the person who will look back in three years and understand, with the clarity that only hindsight provides, exactly what the market was doing and when it was doing it and what they missed.

Here is what the market is doing right now.

Absorption, which is the rate at which listed homes go into contract, was sixty percent higher in February 2026 than it was in February 2025. That number does not mean that every home is selling quickly; it means that the ratio of buyers to available homes has shifted dramatically in the seller's direction, and it has done so faster than most people expected. Sixty percent higher absorption in a single year is not a small move. It is the kind of move that precedes a repricing, the kind of move that analysts notice after the fact and describe as the early signal they should have been watching. The homes that are well-located and well-prepared are not sitting. They are going into contract inside of two weeks, at prices that would have seemed optimistic eighteen months ago, and the sellers who get those results are not the ones who priced aspirationally and hoped for a bidding war. They are the ones who priced intelligently, presented the property correctly, and launched into a market that was ready to receive them.

The mortgage rate picture is more complicated, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not paying attention. As of this writing, the thirty-year fixed rate is running around six and a half percent, which is higher than it was two months ago. The war in the Middle East has introduced volatility into the energy markets, which has introduced volatility into inflation expectations, which has introduced volatility into the bond market, which is where mortgage rates live. The Federal Reserve is watching. The markets are watching. Nobody knows with certainty where rates go from here, and anyone who claims to know is guessing. What is not a guess is that rates at six and a half percent are not historically extreme. They are above the floors of 2021, which were a historical anomaly, a product of a pandemic response that is not coming back. They are below the peaks of late 2023. They are, for a buyer with a strong down payment and a long time horizon, workable, in the way that most things in life are workable when you decide to stop waiting for them to become perfect.

The buyers who are winning in this market are not waiting for rates to fall to five percent. They have made a decision that is not primarily financial, or not only financial, which is that they want to live in San Francisco and they want to own the place they live in, and they have done the arithmetic on what it would cost them to wait another year versus what it would cost them to buy now, and they have concluded that the equity they would build and the stability they would gain and the simple fact of having a place that is theirs outweighs the discomfort of a monthly payment that is higher than they would like. The buyers who lose, repeatedly, are the ones who are waiting for the market to offer them terms that the market has no obligation to offer them. The market does not owe anyone a favorable rate. The market does not know you have been patient. The market is simply moving, at the pace and in the direction it is moving, and the question is whether you are going to move with it.

For sellers, the calculation is somewhat different, but the conclusion is similar. The window that is open right now is not guaranteed to stay open. Inventory is at historic lows, absorption is rising, and the buyers who are active in this market are qualified and motivated and, in many cases, liquid in ways that previous generations of San Francisco buyers were not. The Bay Area produced a hundred and fifty billion dollars in venture capital last year. That capital is not abstractions. It is signing bonuses and vesting schedules and capital gains realizations, and a meaningful fraction of it is looking for a place to land, and the places it tends to land are the places people actually want to live, which is to say well-located, well-maintained homes in neighborhoods with good bones. If you own one of those homes and you have been waiting for the right moment, the data available to you right now is as favorable as it has been in several years. The question is not whether the market is ready. The question is whether you are.

The people who look back most clearly on the decisions they made in this city are not the ones who timed the market perfectly. Nobody times the market perfectly. The people who look back with the least regret are the ones who got honest about what they wanted, built a plan around the actual conditions rather than the ideal conditions, and moved. The market rewards preparation and honesty and action. It has always rewarded those things. It is rewarding them right now.

If you have been waiting, this is the market you were waiting for. Not the perfect market. Not the market of 2021, which is not coming back. This one, with its choppy rates and its historic low inventory and its sixty percent higher absorption and its seventy-three percent of homes closing above asking price. This one, imperfect and present and real, the only one on offer.

Sources: Judson Gregory Real Estate, March 2026 Market Report. Vanguard Properties San Francisco Market Update, March 2026. theFrontSteps SF Market Report, February 2026. OriginPoint Mortgage Minute, March 30, 2026. Compass / Patrick Carlisle, Selected Economic Indicators, March 27, 2026.

Max Wickham is a licensed real estate agent with Compass in San Francisco. CraigEpsteinProperties.com